Question: How will the information about a gribble help you to make petrol out of farming waste?

William Eborall answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Hi thamminb. To make petrol out of farming waste we need to be able to get the sugar out of things like wood, grass and wheat straw. Believe it or not about half of a blade of grass is sugar! I don’t know if you’ve ever bitten a blade of grass, or maybe a wooden cocktail stick? But they don’t taste very sweet! That’s because the sugar is locked up in another form which we can’t use.

But gribble can. Gribble eats wood that it finds in the ocean (like bits of drift wood, or wooden piers). This is all that it eats. Every living thing needs sugar for energy. So gribble must be able to get the sugar out of the wood that it eats. If we can figure out how it does this, we can copy it in a factory to get the sugar out of farming waste. That sugar we can then turn into alcohol to use as petrol!

Hope that answers your question. Let me know if anything is still unclear.